The hormone oxytocin is well-known as the “bliss hormone” because it is secreted upon stimulation by touch and is known to result in a feeling of calm and physical relaxation. But odder claims are that is is a “mindreading” hormone and recent research set out find if there is any truth in those claims.
Physicists doing economics has gotten a bad rap - a practically worldwide recession will do that - but it's no reason to give up, especially if you are of the world view that redistributing wealth is better than a free market.
Models designed to represent taxation and wealth redistribution could be adjusted to create a target level of wealth distribution, according to mathematical physicists from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.
Our immune systems are funny things. An American traveling to Taiwan, for example, might be warned to get a hepatitis vaccine - unless they grew up on a farm. Rabies is even scarier. If you are bitten by an unknown animal, it requires a series of painful injections because if clinical disease sets in, it is usually fatal.
I am very happy to have been invited, by Matteo Polettini, to two events that will take place at
Festivaletteratura (literature festival), an important cultural event that takes place in Mantova, a beautiful town in northern Italy, from the 5th to the 9th of September.
We can't complain that children don't know how to think and act like adults if we homogenize the way children behave...but criminologists wish you would. If you don't, they could be drug addicts.
Defiant kids are correlated with drug dependence - they include cigarettes along with pot and cocaine, naturally - according to surveys analyzed by psychologists at Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center’s (UHC) Research Center and the University of Montreal, concluded following a 15-year population-based paper published in Molecular Psychiatry.
See? America did not need any stinking Kyoto agreement, we just needed for three areas to work in tandem to get greenhouse gas emissions back close to the magic number picked by the Germans and French a decade and a half ago.(1)
The Department of Energy released carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of the energy sector for Q1 of 2012 and they were the lowest since 1992. American energy is positively green again, just like people wanted. We can thank right-wing energy companies for that, because it has primarily happened due to natural gas.
… asks Peter C. Sundt, BSc. in the June 2010) of the journal Elevator World (page 114). Although the article is ‘subscribers only’, an earlier essay by the same author on broadly the same subject (with the same title) is available online here, via The Structural Engineer.
“Most agree that the Great Pyramid at Giza, the last remaining Wonder of the Ancient World, was an amazing job of construction. It’s a great pity, though, that the Egyptians left little or no records of how they did it.”
Most methane comes from natural gas - natural gas used to be loved but once it got popular it got lumped in with mean old fossil fuels so the search is on to find a new, green approach to methane, using microbes that can convert renewable electricity into carbon-neutral methane.
Researchers are raising colonies of microorganisms, called methanogens, which have the ability to turn electrical energy into pure methane, the key ingredient in natural gas. The scientists' goal is to create large microbial factories that will transform clean electricity from solar, wind or nuclear power into renewable methane fuel.
NGC 1187, a spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus (The River), may look tranquil but it's home to some violent events. NGC 1187 has hosted two supernova explosions during the last thirty years, the latest one in 2007.
NGC 1187 was discovered in England by William Herschel in 1784 and can be seen almost face-on, which gives astronomers a good view of its spiral structure. About half a dozen prominent spiral arms can be seen, each containing large amounts of gas and dust. The bluish features in the spiral arms indicate the presence of young stars born out of clouds of interstellar gas.
A number of recent web-notables all seem to revolve (eccentrically) around the question of human evolution. Whether it continues. Whether there is such a thing as "selection in groups." Whether our technological (cyborg) augmentations and/or increasing numbers of "non-neuro-typical" society members portend a new splitting of human destiny. And it looks as if I should have set Existence just five years in the future, instead of 35!
